.BERLIN Off To Flying Start With Record gTLD Registration Numbers On First Day Of GA

The new gTLD for the German capital of Berlin got off to a flying start Tuesday with 31,757 registrations on its first day of General Availability according to nTLDstats.com. This made it easily the gTLD with the most registrations on day one of General Availability since new gTLDs began hitting the market this year.

It also means that at the end of its first day of General Availability .berlin has the second highest number of registrations of the new gTLDs to hit the market behind .guru with 45,269 registrations. At the close of 16 March and the end of the Sunrise period, there were 197 .berlin domains registrations and 24 hours later 31,954.

However, as Adrian Kinderis wrote on the ARI Registry Services blog, registration numbers aren’t everything and that “many in our industry are still persisting with their old TLD ways of thinking”.

Kinderis even had to remind his staff that “there are many ways to determine success” and he wonders “which gTLD is ‘top’ by sustainable revenue.”

One of the keys here will be at the end of the initial registration periods and to see how many registrants renew their domains.

Personally, I have long thought .berlin to be one of the more likely successes of the new gTLD programme and their future assured. The .de zone has well over 15 million registrations making it more difficult than most TLDs to get a preferred domain name. Plus the company behind the gTLD, dotBERLIN Gmbh, has spent nine years working on the project, promoting the idea to local businesses, government at all levels and residents meaning there was a high level of awareness in the city. And Berlin is a dynamic city with a high level of technology awareness and has, according to the mayor, well over 500 technology start-ups.